Swimming in deeper waters

It's been an eventful few days. On Thursday I went to Cambridge to see A Wilde Life, a crowdfunded musical about Oscar Wilde, with emperor and atreic. On Friday I went to one day of Focus, a weekend of worship and fellowship for HTB network churches. On Saturday I went to Sheffield to visit djm4 and sfred, and then yesterday I took my parents to Underneath the Stars, their very first folk festival.

Focus was A Lot(tm). HTB, or Holy Trinity Brompton, is the church which created and popularised the Alpha course, and has a practice of church planting - that is, sending out ministers and members to create new churches with a similar ethos and style of worship, and the HTB network is all those church plants, of which St Luke's is one. I arrived about half an hour before the big morning worship session, which gave me enough time to find the St Luke's campsite, say hello to a few people, and then head over to worship. Whilst walking over and waiting for things to get started, I had a good chat with P, who is doing a PhD in quantum computing at UCL. His childhood experiences of church were fairly middle-of-the-road Anglican, which I think helps him empathise quite well with what a culture shock it is for me to submerge myself in charismatic worship after a lifetime of traditionalism.

( More about the day, CN: some discussion of homophobia )